SOURCE: Buell, Lawrence. “Thoreau's A Week.” In Literary Transcendentalism: Style and Vision in the American Renaissance, pp. 208‐38. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1973.

In the following excerpt, Buell traces the course of A Week and explains how it displays, through “endless suggestiveness,” the Transcendentalist sensibility.

Written largely during his years at Walden Pond, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers comes closer than any of Thoreau's later writing to an unguarded expression of his relationship to nature.1 In Walden the speaker is obviously much more familiar with his surroundings, but he is also more detached in his presentation of them: he begins and ends in polemic and the account of his experiences is subsumed within an analytical framework throughout. Much of A Week, one feels, might have been taken straight from a journal, but very little of Walden. This helps to make Walden a better book, critically speaking, but...